Onwards, ever onwards ...

Just an update to prove I'm still here ...

I've decided to take the new job at my current place, so at least that's resolved and there's no unemployment to endure.  There is, however, a foru month trial period in the new role, so the story hasn't really ended just yet.

I have managed to arange a game at the local club tomorrow night and will be playing Formula De, a fun game. I have a number of plans for this (as I seem to have for everything!) so it'll be good to get another game of it under my belt and maybe try a few new things for it, time permitting!

Hopefully now that the job situation is on a much more even keel, I'll be able to make some proper posts here again - thanks to all the followers for persevering with the blog through these unsettled times!

Bad news ...

Apologies for yet another long gap between posts ...

However, for once I have a decent reason (at least I think  it is!). The day after making my last post, I was called into a meeting by my boss at work, and told that due to the reorganisation within my department (which I'd known about for quite a while) my post was no longer required and therefore if I did not take the new position, I would be made redundant ...  bit of a shock ...

So instead of making things and doing hobby stuff over the last couple of weeks, I've been feeling sorry for myself and trying to decide if I want to take the new role - which is VERY different from my current role - or redundancy and the attendant risk of finding a new job. I've been made redundant before (twice actually) and it's not much fun at all.

So apologies for the lack of updates and especially to Simon for not replying to his facebook contact (I rejoined facebook just before getting this news)

Willpower?? What's that?

It's been quite a week since my last post ... during which my willpower to resist new "shinies" seems to have evaporated completely :(

Having read a post ( planning-winter-war ) on Steve Blease's blog, I caved in and have backed the Baker Company Winter War Kickstarter.  This conflict is one that I've long wanted to game, so although slightly guilty about the expense (I've gone for the £120 'Border Assault' pledge) I'm happy to have done it.

(This pledge level will give me Finnish and Soviet Platoons and includes access to all stretch-goals - currently upto 19! - and free limited figures.)

Also, on Saturday just gone, I went to Newcastle to attend my younger sister's 40th birthday do (gawd do I feel old ... my little sister is 40!).  Anyway, I decided to visit Wargames Emporium in Sheffield on my way, so browsed their website to see what they had ...

After discovering their Hydra Miniatures' War Rocket pages, and then reading this detailed review of the game, I decided to shell out for the game and some miniatures. Needless to say, I got carried away and bought too much :(

Apart from increasing my lead & resin mountains, I'm still working on the rebasing of my 6mm zombie game figures. Despite what I said in my last post - 6mm-zombies - I've gone for 5 military or police on a base, 6 civilians and 8 zombies. I'll take some pics soon and post them here ...

6mm Zombies

Well after a delay my 6mm zombie hordes from Exodus Wars finally arrived over the weekend (would provide a link, but their webiste is down ...).  I got 4 packs each of which has 50 zombies in - 20 male and 10 of female, boy and girl zombies ... Exodus' in house painter has published a picture of the painted horde here and I'm looking forward to getting mine done soon.

Meanwhile, I've decided to re-base the military, police and civilians that you can see in this pic, from the last-but-one post. After considerable messing about trying to texture the bases, I decided that they looked too empty, so I'm doing them all again. This time they'll be on 25mm square bases. Instead of 4 figures on each military and police base, and 5 on a civilian base, I'm going to put 5 on a military, 6 on police and 7 or 8 (not sure atm) on the civilian bases.  As to the zeds ... I'll put together some mock-ups and seek advice from the blog-o-sphere soon!

Not a city, but a building ...

Well, I didn't get the 'cityscape' together last night, but I did get out one of the buildings I've made ... I also did a 'proof of concept' on the base finish I intend to use. You can see that on the smaller support base - as well as the top of the building - in the photo to the right. Also there is one of the police bases.

To the left you can see an angled shot of the building with the bases still on the top to give an idea of size. Unfortunately, the building's colour is really washed out in this pic ...

... but this pic - despite it's decidedly pooh quality :( - gives a much better idea of the colour!


I got a lot more painting and first stage basing done last night and hope to get more done tonight, although there's no promise of an update as rapidly as this one appeared!

Finally painted something!

Over the weekend, I managed to get some paint onto some figures! It may not sound like much of an acievement (and the grand scale of things, it really isn't ...), but I'm pleased, as I can't really remember the last time I painted anything ... :(  I've got pics below of what I've painted, and the cars I got from eBay that I mentioned in my last post; however, I've just added a desk lamp which seems to have made the photos to bright :( I suppose it makes a change from too dark though!

Anyway, last week I'd managed to base up all the 6mm figures I'd got from Irregular to use with ATZ-Mass Hysteria, and you can see them in the group pic to the right. Humans in ATZ-MH come in 3 types, Military, Police or Civilians and in the pic, the Military bases are in the green rectangle, Police in the blue, and civvies in the red. As you might be abble to make out, there are 2 types of Military bases: 'normal' and 'support' (the smaller ones at the top).

To the left is a close-up of  one of the painted 'normal' military bases. Flesh for hands & faces, leaf green for uniform, umber for boots and dark grey for weapons is the extent of colours used.  With 6mil's the key is to paint in blobs and remember they'll be seen at arm's length!

Here is one of the Police bases. Again a very simple scheme. As this photo and the one before show, I've gone with 4 figures per base for the Military and Police, but five for civilians - none of them painted so no pics!  I've not got any zed bases done yet - figures not arrived! - but when I do them, I'll stick as many on as I can manage for a real horde effect ...

So, as all the military bases were done, I dipped them using Army Painter magic dip, strong tone. This really gives the mini's a great finish, although the pics don't do it justice I'm afraid ...  to the left is a normal base

Here is one of the two types of support base I've done - this is a GPMG

And here is the second type of support base - a mortar team. In Grekwood mini's accesory sale (thanks Carl!) I got some Extra fine ballast that I'm going to use to finish the bases

I trawled back through my photos and found this picture to the right that shows more clearly how the dip finishes the 6mil figs - in this case a Baccus WSS infantry strip (the sames as recently seen in this post on Clint's blog); for before and after dipping pics see this post:
army-painter-quick-shade-aka-magic-dip

On to the cars I purchased from eBay. For the princely sum of £6.17 (with free p&p) I got the bag of painted model cars that you see to the left. Allegedly it contains 100 painted cars, but I haven't counted them ;)

The ebay item description (hope the link works!) describes them as 'N/Z 1:200' scale, but as you can see in the pic to the right they fit almost perfectly with the (supposedly!) 1/300th figures from Irregular - at least IMHO!

And they also seem to fit with the 1/300th vehicles that I got from Irregular at the same time, which are (l-r in pic) a fire engine (which seems very small to me!), Transit Van and Saxon APC

Apart from use as board clutter/decoration, I intend to use them to make the barricades that ATZ-MH allows you to make to slow the onrushing zed horde, and the pic to the right shows a quick mock-up of how that might appear; not entirely sure at present how I'll do it though ...

That's it for this post; next time I'll show the city-scape I've made for the game, and hopefully some more of the figures painted

very small cars and world war z

I watched World War Z last night. While some of the effects were very good (particularly the zeds piling up and the way they blindly ran off rooftops), all-in-all I felt a bit disappointed when it had finished ... No battle of Yonkers or anything similar; in fact, although it's been quite a while since I read the book, nothing really connected the film to the book for me ...

Moving on, I took a chance on ebay not long ago and ordered "100 Model Car Building Train Layout Set N Z Scale 1/200", hoping that they'd fit with 6mm miniatures for my ATZ: Mass Hysteria plans. I am very pleased to say that they do and I'll put some pics of them up soon - honest!